Apparently N. T. Wright has his Romans 9:5 commentary in the New Interpreter's Bible.
https://www.answering-islam.org/authors ... ly/4e.html
And maybe in other works
Paul and the Theology of Romans
Paul for Everyone: Romans: Chapters 1-8
Paul and Caesar: A New Reading of Romans
This blog page above (uneven) has two extracts from the Interpreter's Bible:
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i. from them comes the Messiah according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed for ever, Amen.
ii. from them comes the Messiah according to the flesh, who is over all. God be blessed for ever, Amen.
iii. from them comes the Messiah according to the flesh. God who is over all be blessed for ever, Amen.
Grammatically the arguments weigh heavily on the side of (i); in other words, on the side that Paul does indeed here ascribe divinity to Christ. Of the various arguments here, perhaps the strongest is that it would be highly unusual for Paul to write an asyndetic doxology–that is, an expression of praise that is not linked to a word in the immediately preceding sentence (see, e.g., 1:25).
More compelling than grammar alone is the consideration of how v. 5, read according to (i) above, makes sense in its wider context. We have already remarked how the complex theological statement of the gospel in 1:3-4 serves as an introduction to the whole letter, especially to chaps. 1-8. In this statement Jesus is described as both “of the seed of David according to the flesh” and also “son of God in power according to the spirit holiness.” This leads to an emphasis on his universal rule and a call to allegiance. A double statement in which the Messiah’s “fleshly” descent is balanced by his universal sovereignty would form a close parallel to this, creating a probability that at least “who is over all” goes with “Christ.” This would seem to favor (i) or (ii), but it has to be said that the abrupt final sentence of (ii) is even less likely than the longer but nevertheless “unbalanced” sentence in (iii). In other words, if 9:5 is intended to be the same kind of double statement that we find in 1:3-4, (i) is the most likely reading…
If we read v. 5 in this way, what force does it add to the opening paragraph as a whole? Just this: that the Messiah who is from Israel’s own race, their highest privilege and final hope, is the very embodiment of their sovereign Lord, their covenant God. And it is he whom they have rejected; this is precisely the point Paul makes in 10:21, at the close of the main “story” of chaps. 9 and 10. Just as Israel rejected their God on Mt. Sinai, precipitating Moses into his extraordinary prayer (see above), so now Israel according to the flesh has rejected its God as he came in the flesh, precipitating Paul into his own version of that prayer and his own great, unceasing grief. Israel’s highest privilege, when spurned, becomes the cause of Israel’s greatest tragedy.
But even that tragedy contains within itself the seed of hope. Just because the Messiah “according to the flesh” is also “God over all, blessed for ever,” and particularly because his “flesh” was the place where God “condemned sin” (8:3), so the strange and sad story of Israel’s fate, to which Paul will now turn, is designed to lead on and out into new life. Read in this way, 9:5 becomes an exact, if ironic, summary of both parts of the argument that will now unfold.
(N. T. Wright, “The Letter to the Romans: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume X, pp. 630-631; bold emphasis ours)
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“But there are also indications that Paul intended 9:5 to serve in this way–not as a detached Christological statement (he was not given to sudden statements of doctrine, however, important, in isolation from actual arguments), but as a kind of heading for what is to come. The whole argument of 9-11, as we have suggested, moves toward, and finally affirms, the universal sovereignty of Jesus as Messiah and Lord, with 10:4-13 as the decisive statement. Though Paul does not there call Jesus (theos, ‘God’), he calls him (kyrios, ‘Lord’), in one of the many passages where he is quoting from a Septuagint passage in which kyrios stood unambiguously for the Tetragrammaton, the sacred name YHWH… (10:13, quoting Joel 3:5 LXX; see the Commentary on 10:13). The stress on ‘all’ in this central passage picks up exactly the point of ‘who is over all’ in 9:5, and increases the strong possibility that Paul intended the word ‘God’ there to understood as a predicate of the Messiah. Chapters 9-11 close with the intention of God toward ‘all’ (11:32), and a burst of praise to God (11:33-36) that echoes the brief ‘blessed for ever’ of 9:5 (cf. 14:5-12).”
(Wright, The New Interpreter’s Bible, pp. 630-631; bold emphasis ours)
And:
“… Jew and Gentile come together in sharing the common faith in the same Lord (Paul is already looking ahead to chap. 14). And the ‘Lord’ in question, while identified from the earlier verses as Jesus the Messiah, is equally the (kyrios) of the LXX. This is where the breathtaking assertion of 9:5, that the Messiah who belonged to Israel according to the flesh is also ‘God over all, blessed for ever,’ shows up at the heart of the argument. This is where christology determines ecclesiology–including where the church stands vis-à-vis the pagan emperor!–as well as soteriology. ‘The same Lord is Lord of all.’ That was what Caesar claimed, and it was what Paul claimed for Jesus. At the same time, Paul is picking up, and transforming, a regular Jewish theme: one God, therefore one people of Israel (cf. Zech 14:9-17). Where, before, ‘no distinction ‘ was explained by ‘for all have sinned’ (3:23), now it can be explained by ‘for there is one Lord of all.’ As in 3:27-30, monotheism undergirds the universality of the gospel–though, as elsewhere in Paul, it is monotheism with Jesus at the heart of it.”
(
Ibid., p. 665; bold emphasis ours)
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